ShareJosiah McElheny’s Prismatic Park: Jodi Melnick

Danspace Project has been invited by artist and MacArthur Foundation Fellowship recipient, Josiah McElheny, to participate in Madison Square Park Conservancy’s thirty-fourth exhibition, Prismatic Park. Danspace Executive Director & Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor, has invited four dance artists to “inhabit” the Park to realize new commissions throughout the exhibition. The project features three large sculptures of painted wood and prismatic glass on view in Madison Square Park from June 13, 2017 through October 8, 2017. The resident artists will create ambitious new work that summons the potential for imagination, creativity, and performance inspired by spontaneous audiences and chance encounters.

Choreographer Jodi Melnick will inhabit Prismatic Park from Tuesday, September 12 through Sunday, September 24, 2017.

New York City-based Melnick is a choreographer, dancer, performer, and teacher. Her work engages with the continuous act of creating, driven by her physical expressiveness and investigation with movement and the body. For this residency, she explains, “the body continues to be my aesthetic material…During my two-week occupancy [at Madison Square Park] I will be working and looking at past, present, and developing new work with an array of bodies.”

“I am inviting other performers that I have recently worked with, artists that I have admired from near and afar, and collaborators. I will be generating new movement, destroying older material, waiting, waiting, waiting, running, walking, watching, interacting, listening, listening, listening. The green public space, the people in the park, sounds of the city, smell of Shake Shack, and Josiah McElheny’s Prismatic Park installation are my set designers and will provide the collaborative nature of this occupancy.”

ShareAndré M. Zachery/Renegade Performance Group: Untamed Space

Half hour long pre-show discussions will take place each night at 7pm! Facilitators for the discussions include:Rosamond S. King (Thursday, September 28)Dr. Nadine George-Graves (Friday, September 29)Dr. Layla Zami withAndré Zachery (Saturday, September 30)

*Please note: there is no late seating for these performances.*

In Untamed Space, Renegade Performance Group artistic director and choreographer André M. Zachery calls upon his familial lineage in the Southern United States and Haiti and his upbringing on the south side of Chicago to construct an interdisciplinary performance about “marooning” in the 21st Century.

Historically, maroon colonies were liberated communities of Africans who escaped to hills, mountains, and forests upon their arrival to the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries. Untamed Space considers the spiritual dimensions of maro​on colonies and, in Zachery’s own words,​ “how the creation of those impassible spaces has influenced contemporary identities of African-blooded people in the Americas.​”

This is Zachery’s latest foray under his AFROFUTURISM series, an ongoing artistic investigation exploring and reinterpreting Black signifiers and culture through technology with a contemporary perspective. Untamed Space covers the trajectory of marooning across time and space: starting in Haiti, moving to Mississippi, and, as Zachery explains, “arriving at my point of departure in Chicago, and into the Afrofuture.”

ShareDraftWork: Jonathan Gonzalez / Jessie Young

Curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones, the DraftWork series hosts informal, free Saturday afternoon performances that offer choreographers an opportunity to show their work in various stages of development. Performances are followed by discussion and a reception with the artists and curator.